


The Parting Glass

by Lilliburlero



Category: 20th Century CE RPF, Return to Night - Mary Renault, The Charioteer - Mary Renault, The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Alcohol, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Anglo-Irish Relations, Black and Tans, Bloody Sunday, F/M, HIV/AIDS, IRA - Freeform, Ireland, Irish Republicanism, Irish War of Independence, M/M, Music, Northern Ireland, Northern Irish Troubles, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Songfic, unionism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 07:03:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2015577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Nothing, is it?' said Laurie, whom something had rendered perverse.  In this mood he was apt to become Irish. His brogue, however, was of literary origin, consisting of stock phrases carefully acquired.</p><p>—<i>The Charioteer</i>, Chapter 2</p><p>An exploration of the Irish hinterland to <i>The Charioteer</i>.</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: descriptions of murder, (non-violent) major character death, oblique mentions of HIV/AIDS, mentions of homophobia, discussion of alcoholism.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. April 1972

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Naraht](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht) for some very helpful beta commentary, which provoked an unexpected efflorescence of backstory from an original character.
> 
> On 21st November 1920, during the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Republican Army killed fourteen British intelligence officers. That afternoon, members of the RIC and its paramilitary Auxiliary Division opened fire on spectators at a Gaelic football match at Croke Park, killing fourteen. This day of violence was referred to as Bloody Sunday.
> 
> On 30th January 1972, members of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment shot 26 civilians during a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march in Londonderry/Derry. 13 of them were killed, and one man shot died of his injuries four months later. This day also became known as Bloody Sunday. The tribunal set up to investigate the incident under Lord Widgery exonerated 1 Para and the British authorities of blame, and was widely seen as a whitewash. 
> 
> I have tried to represent a range of nuanced responses to these events but they are the reactions of the characters depicted, and do not represent my own views.
> 
> *
> 
> There are two Irish songs known as _The Foggy Dew_ , both sung to a harp tune considerably older than either set of lyrics: a love song of 1910 by E.H. Milligan, and a song of political protest, written before 1919 by Canon Charles O'Neill, commemorating the [Easter Rising.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Rising) These songs are not related to the English folk-song.
> 
> This story will make more sense if you have heard these songs.
> 
> [The Foggy Dew (love song)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhrilg7OHlM), sung by John McCormack
> 
> [The Foggy Dew (political song)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaS3vaNUYgs), sung by Sinead O'Connor, with The Chieftains.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ralph has slightly unexpected views on Bloody Sunday (1972) and the Widgery Tribunal.

‘The fools, the fools, the fools,’ Ralph said lightly, ‘they have left them their Fenian dead.’  He tapped the _Guardian_ with a teaspoon.

Laurie was startled, though after more than thirty years, he reflected, he should not be startled at the the things Ralph dredged from a memory whose orderliness was astonishingly little impaired by the twenty-odd he’d spent in only approximate sobriety.  He drank less now, though he still _drank_.  It was his looks that had suffered: not yet fifty-eight, thin, white-haired and haggard, he would pass for a very well-preserved seventy. And his health: he’d recovered hearteningly from December’s pneumonia, rather better than had Laurie’s nerves—Ralph, much possessed of patience for the emotional frailty of others, had correspondingly little to spare for his own body’s infirmity—but it had been nevertheless an insight into Christmases Yet To Come. _Qu’est-ce que je fais dans cette galère_? Laurie asked himself ritualistically, knowing, as he always had, exactly what the answer was.

‘I don’t know why you still take it,’ he replied levelly, ‘It hasn’t been worth wrapping fried fish in since it moved from Manchester.’

‘Find out what the enemy’s thinking. And the crossword.’

‘One and the same, aren’t they?’ he said in a vain attempt at politic deflection.  Laurie thought that Ralph’s taste in crosswords should be strictly Ximenean, somehow, but it wasn’t.

‘I’m serious, Spud.’  Laurie could see the lineaments of righteous indignation forming beneath the tolerant, mirthless smile.

‘As I’d feared. So, what’s the enemy thinking this morning?’

‘That they can get away with bloody murder,’  he took a gulp of coffee, ‘sling me those fags, will you?—torture, and false imprisonment.’

‘It’s not quite—the position I’d expect you to take.’ Laurie pushed the packet of Winstons and the lighter across the table.

Ralph’s eyebrow shot up.  ‘Oh, really? Why’s that?’

‘Well—the situation isn’t one that can be reasonably managed by civil means any more.  These IRA— _enclaves_ in Londonderry—’ 

‘We won’t break them by shooting unarmed boys in the back of the head. Jackie Duddy, Hugh Gilmour, Kevin McElhinney, Michael Kelly, John Young, Gerald Donaghey. All seventeen years old _.’_

Laurie, about to say something about nail bombs, thought better of it.  Trust Ralph to know the _names._  

‘Widgery reeks to high heaven.  I should know, don’t you think?’

‘You never had anything to do with Ireland—’

Ralph’s face closed into its aggravating Official Secrets Act look—you’d have thought he’d been Director-General of MI5, Laurie thought crossly, not a glorified file-clerk who had to resign because—because.  Ralph, he conceded, maybe knew a little bit about put-up jobs.

‘It’s _because_ I’m a Conservative and a Unionist, my dear. I happen to think it means something.  In both directions.’  He sketched an airy, elegant line, bottom right to top left and back. ‘But even if I didn’t, I hope I’d have the wit to see that one doesn’t put down an insurgency by convincing people they’ve got something to riot about.’  

‘Well, what would you do?’

‘Oh, nothing to be done now. We’ll keep on throwing innocent men as well as guilty ones in prison, and the IRA will have its head along the border. We might have done something by not giving in to that bigot Carson and his mob in 1914, I suppose.  I’ll be late. I have to take a couple of blokes from Yarrows to dinner.  Don’t wait up if you don’t like.’   

He stubbed his cigarette, pushed back his chair, bent to kiss Laurie on the cheek, and was gone before Laurie could muster a verbal farewell. He whistled softly through his teeth. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ralph (mis)quotes Patrick Pearse's 1915 oration at the grave of the nationalist activist Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa: 'The Defenders of this Realm [...] think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.'
> 
> Edward Carson campaigned against Home Rule (i.e. devolved government) for Ireland in the 1910s, founding the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers (subsequently the Ulster Volunteer Force) in 1913. The UVF received a large cache of arms from Germany in early 1914. The Asquith government prepared to send troops to Ulster to suppress UVF opposition to Home Rule, but backed down under pressure from the Army, many of whose officers would not support action against the UVF. The third Home Rule Bill was passed in May 1914, but suspended upon the outbreak of the First World War. Developments in Ireland during the following years meant that the Home Rule Act of 1914 never took effect. It was superseded by the the Government of Ireland Acts of 1920 and 1922. The latter created the Irish Free State and gave the six north-eastern counties of Ulster the right to remain in the Union as Northern Ireland.
> 
> (Ralph is slightly illogical here, for although Unionist confidence was high in 1914 and proposals for Irish Home Rule had been substantially watered down to mollify Unionist sentiment, the outbreak of the First World War nonetheless played a rather greater role in frustrating devolution than did Carson's UVF. But he probably has [other reasons than Irish politics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Carson,_Baron_Carson#Oscar_Wilde) to harbour some distaste for Edward Carson.)


	2. November 1920

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael Odell reacts to the events of Bloody Sunday, 1920.

Louise Flint’s dinner party was to mark a firm purpose of amendment. Lucy and Michael  Odell would attend it as that which they were determined to become: a contented, settled couple; the ridiculous business with the Grey woman quite put behind them.  Michael was, in his fashion, genuinely contrite: Celia had been a particularly histrionic variety of trouble, and her age (she was eleven years Michael’s senior, and nineteen years Lucy’s) a further insult to his twenty-six-year-old wife.  But it was over, and had been for six weeks, a period during which he had signified his repentance by foregoing drink in the evenings, only taking his ineluctable lunchtime pint, without which nothing at all would get covered.  Three nights ago, he had been readmitted to the marital bed, so far chastely.  Lucy did not intend, this time, to rush things. 

Michael was in the office on Sunday afternoon.  He heard the news from Dublin almost as soon as it was wired in. He filed the copy he had been dallying over—a humorous biographical sketch of Woodrow Wilson—despatched a telegram to his sister Eileen, and went to the Tipperary.

Lucy was waiting up for him, arranged in the attitudes of a wronged but stoical wife. She had let the fire burn down, as if there were not enough coal; the standard lamp by her chair threw light on her hands and shadowed her drawn face.  She was knitting a wine-red gansey that was destined, when finished, to engage in irreconcilable hostilities with the colouring that Laurie had inherited from her.  She did not look up when he entered.  

He stood over her.  ‘Lucy. Come here to me.’  He dropped to his haunches, steadying himself with his right hand between his knees.  She looked at him for the first time, with scorn.  ‘I’m sorry. Something terrible’s happened.’

‘So instead of finding comfort at home you found it in the bosom of a Fleet Street barmaid.  I see.’

‘Holy God.  Aren’t you even going to ask—’

‘I’m not sure that I want to know, but I don’t doubt you’ll tell me.’

‘Christ.’  Michael got up, scrambling a little, took a cigarette from the box and lit it with the table-lighter.  ‘I’m not even—I only took a couple of pints of porter.’  He sat on the sofa, elbows on knees and head in hands.

‘And the rest. Look, tell me what happened.’

He looked up suddenly. ‘You wouldn’t fetch me—’ She looked incredulous. ‘No, I suppose not.’

‘A wire came through while I was in the office. The IRA shot some—agents, informers—in Dublin this morning. And the Tans surrounded Croke Park and fired into the crowd as a reprisal. People were killed. That’s all I know.’

‘Oh, that's _horrible_. A _park_?’

‘The GAA ground.  There was a match, Gaelic football.  It was a gala affair, a benefit for the Republican Prisoners Fund—’

‘Oh, _Republicans_ —but you wouldn’t know anybody at that, would you?’

Michael fought an expression of dislike, irritated by Lucy’s propensity to contract everything to the dimensions of the fireside.

‘I think Fran could have been there.’

‘But your mother surely wouldn’t let—’

‘He’s seventeen now.  Not the little boy in that photograph any more.’

‘You don’t think he could be caught up in one of these—murder gangs?’

‘If you mean,’ Michael smiled lopsidedly and stiffly, making an effort not to roll his eyes and not quite managing it, ‘is he a member of the IRA, no.' But why not? Kevin Barry had been two forms above Fran at Belvedere—he hadn't known him except to see, though, and had never had anything to say about him before his trial and execution. 'I don't think so. But he is sympathetic, the little eejit. If he was there, Mammy won’t talk to him till Candlemas.’  He laughed uncertainly.  'Jesus, Lucy, I need a drink.  _Please_.’  

‘No. You’ve had enough. Millie’s gone to bed, but I’ll make you coffee.’

‘I don’t need _coffee_.  I can’t sleep as it is.  It’s humiliating.  Inside of my own house.’

‘If you didn’t humiliate yourself—and me— _outside_ our house, Michael, I wouldn’t have to lock the brandy in the pantry.’

He was silent for a minute.  ‘May I go up to him, Lucy?  I shan’t waken him, on my honour.  I just want to—’

‘No. I won’t have you upsetting him, and you will.  Oh, my dear, do go to bed.’ That meant the spare bedroom, Michael reckoned; ignominious a setback though it was, he was not altogether disappointed at having a bed to himself.

A telegram from Eileen arrived the next morning, an economical _all safe and well_. He took that as a tacit admission that Fran had been there, and was in trouble for it. He hoped it would shock him into sense, knowing the hope was vain: what romantic seventeen-year-old could see those bastards firing on civilians and not want to avenge them? That afternoon he mitched off work and went to Prime Minister’s Questions.  

The Chief Secretary for Ireland rose. ‘I shall give now, just as I have received them, the details of, I think, one of the most awful tragedies in the history of our Empire: There have been fourteen deaths—’

So only British informers counted, then. Michael should not have been surprised: there had been nearly two years of this, but he ground his teeth and the sinews in his neck tightened.  Greenwood jawed on, detailing each killing.  The IRA were beasts, there was no doubt of it, shooting unarmed men in cold blood in front of womenfolk and servants.  He was moved despite himself by the account of Mrs Newbury, who had flung herself in front of her husband while he tried to escape: the gunmen threw her aside and shot him seven times in the chest. When the police arrived they found she had had the presence of mind to cover the body, still half-in, half-out the window.

The grim catalogue drew to a close, ‘—bed saturated, body and especially head horribly disfigured. Possibly the hammer was used as well as shots to finish off this gallant officer.’

Joseph Devlin was on his feet, demanding to ask a question.  Both sides of the house roared at him to sit down, but he did not.  A white-haired MP in pince-nez, whom Michael didn’t recognise, crossed the floor to a shout of protest from the Speaker and grabbed Wee Joe by the collar, trying to pull him over the bench, lifting him off his feet.  The men beside Devlin dragged him back, tearing his coat at the shoulder. Michael turned to the spectator beside him with, ‘Who’s that—’ but ushers were bustling in, emptying the galleries  to preserve the fiction of parliamentary behaviour.  Michael bolted for a pub in Bridge Street.  

The house was dark when he got home.  He hesitated before Laurie’s room, feeling a compulsion nearly irresistible to look in, to check his son was still _there._ The door of the master bedroom opened, and Lucy, in dressing-gown and curl-papers, stood in the frame.  Her face was still soft with sleep, hardening, it seemed, from her pursed lips outward.  She closed the door with exaggerated care, and Michael continued on his way to the spare room.

The next morning, at breakfast, he explained what had happened, and Lucy was minded to sympathise: her countrymen and women by marriage had been shot and killed by British forces, it was very upsetting; something most definitely should have been said in Parliament.  Sour-mouthed and dull with crapula, Michael turned to the House of Commons report to see, rather to his shame, that PMQs had resumed, and Devlin had his hearing.  She probably wouldn’t think to read it, but leaving for work he shoved the paper into his coat anyway.  He came home that evening straight from the office and played an infantile form of marbles with Laurie on the hearthrug before a strained but cordial dinner with his wife.

On Wednesday morning a letter came from Fran, written partly on Sunday night and then, Michael conjectured from its mounting incoherence, scribbled in the interstices of Monday morning school.  He had managed to conceal from their mother (he thought from Eileen too) his presence at Croke Park, explaining his late arrival home with the roadblocks. Michael groaned aloud: had she known, Mammy might have exercised her uncanny powers of silent reproach upon him. As it was, the boy had to cope with both what he had witnessed and keeping it a secret. The letter was oddly muted, even evasive, with none of the flarings of righteous indignation that had characterised some of his recent correspondence.  Michael had no time to compose an adequate reply that day.

He liked Louise Flint.  She was intelligent and gracious: she did not shy from mentioning Sunday to him, but she did so courteously and neutrally, as she led him across the room to meet the woman he was to take in, expressing concern for his family and the deteriorating situation.  Her tact did not extend, however, to equipping him with an elderly or plain partner; Mrs Fleming was no more than thirty, exquisitely beautiful and impeccably stylish, though there was no dash in the way she wore her blue silk, no vivacity in her expression—nothing, as it happened, to his taste at all, but he could never hope to explain that to Lucy.  

Mrs Fleming was a war widow; she had a small son a year or two older than Laurie, upon whom she seemed to expend great energy and curiously little affection. Michael had by nature a gift for extracting information, much honed by his profession, but he could deduce no more from Mrs Fleming that there was something of moment she was withholding; the exercise kept his mind busy, though her conversation was rather dull.  On his other hand was Mrs Raynes, newly married and infinitely suggestible; a few gentle prompts provoked a tale both unwholesome and banal about her brother-in-law; he found he did not want to hear it, any of it, but only the withdrawal of the ladies halted it.

Michael had been drinking steadily, but the dinner conversation had depressed his spirits such that he was barely aware of intoxication. The nondescript-looking young Scot across the table embarked on a farcical story about an adjutant in the Royal Welch and a polo pony. His name was Clare and he had journalistic ambitions, which, given tolerable luck, he looked likely to fulfil.  He was in no of need sententious or cynical advice from a medlar rotting on a once-influential clubland paper in precipitous decline since the war, Michael thought, and rather than engage him as Louise had no doubt meant when she introduced them before dinner, left him to the energetic conventionalities of Major Ramsey. Michael having endured these on a few occasions in the past, thought to his present state of mind they would be almost insupportable. 

He turned to a recently-qualified surgeon who had the assured, curiously hygienic air of a successful seducer; he knew the man slightly from one of Celia’s lunches. Their desultory conversation allowed Michael to indulge his taste for overhearing—one which at one time often brought in professional advancement some justification for its want of manners.  But those lucky occasions had been before the war and the withering of his promise.  Now, instead of an indicative morsel of gossip or the germ of a sketch, he caught the tail-end of Ramsey’s remark about reprisals.  It was not a particularly offensive remark.  It was one which he heard and read daily: regret that passions run high when men see their comrades murdered and the recreant perpetrators melt back into the civilian population.  He worked hard to keep his face inexpressive; too hard, for Ramsey caught the corner of his eye.  Michael saw his confidence falter slightly, and felt suddenly disinclined to tolerance.  He gave Ramsey a straight look.   

‘Well, you’re an Irishman, Odell; it must be a dismay to you, these murders and so forth.’

‘Indeed, Major Ramsey.  But I maintain a robust belief in the justice of the United Kingdom, and trust, for example, that we shall see committed for trial and execution the gang that murdered in cold blood fourteen of their,’ Mr Clare had caught the drift of this careful syntax, and amusement and alarm contended in his unremarkable features, ‘fellow creatures last Sunday—afternoon.’

Ramsey’s high colour rose.  ‘Such a lapse of discipline is to be deplored, of course.  But you can’t mean to equate these policemen and Auxiliaries who lost their heads with the assassins who provoked them.’   

‘Nothing could be further from my mind than to equate them.  The IRA is chiefly composed of persons with grievances—some justified—led, or misled, by some very cunning and ruthless men, and it would be foolish to underestimate them.  But I think we should hold trained forces—those in the pay of His Majesty—to a somewhat higher standard than the amateurs, don’t you?’

‘These men have been through two years of agony—intolerable provocation.  It’s not unreasonable that they should act in self-defence—’

‘Defence against what, Major? Bruises from a hard leather ball?  Or papercuts from the programme?’

‘Be fair.  This was an anomaly—a shameful one, and it should be condemned.  But the atrocities committed by the other side are routine; their very _modus operandi_.  There would be no hitting back if the murders would stop.’

‘When my son makes repartee of that class, Major, my wife tells him that if wishes were horses beggars might ride.  He is three years of age.’

‘And you know as little as he, Odell, of the particular anger that might drive serving forces to reprisals.  The murderers whom you seem so anxious to defend know more of it than you.  Or am I wrong?’

Mr Clare signalled rather desperately with his eyes at Mrs Flint’s cousin, who was performing the office of host, but he was thoroughly engaged in a story which looked from its accompanying gestures to be indecent.

Michael had too much pride to volunteer the truth on this matter.  He did not look like a man with a weak heart: he was broad-shouldered and stocky, with the vivid dark colouring that his mother said was good Kerry Gael, a right O’Donoghue; Fran and Eileen, lean and mousy, were Odells, English shopkeepers.  (Were an ill-informed person to impute nationalist feeling to this ethnic partition of her offspring, Mrs Odell’s eyebrows would spring into her widow’s cap and the next offer of tea or sandwiches would be made, devastatingly, once.)  In Dublin when war broke out, he had volunteered and been rejected. His relief had horrified him, and he buried it deep beneath inchoate notions of the Congo and the Casement Report, though he was less afraid of death than of killing, and more than either, of the doom his physical clumsiness would wreak upon others.  His move to London the following year had made him eligible for call-up, but he was again barred on health grounds, even after the criteria were relaxed in ’17.  Lucy thought his reticence entirely absurd and cited Milton’s sonnet on his blindness—clearly, a schoolroom staple—in support of her position. 

‘A man does not have to have served in an imperial war to tell right from wrong, Major Ramsey.’  Michael stood, not pushing his chair back far enough; his knees engaged perilously with the tablecloth, and he had to plant his fists hard on the table to to keep his balance.  But he managed a creditably dignified exit, and when he emerged from the cloakroom a servant was on hand to tell him the gentlemen had joined the ladies.

Louise smiled and beckoned to him as he entered the drawing room.  A tall, grey-haired woman of about fifty sat beside her, upright in a low chair; her face was a perfect oblong, rather weathered, firm and strong in the jawline.  It was a physiognomy which held certain associations.

‘May I present Michael Odell, Mrs Maunsell?’  

‘How do you do?’

Michael bowed. 

‘Mrs Flint tells me you are from Dublin, but she can’t say whereabouts.’  

‘My mother, brother and sister have moved to Terenure now, Mrs Maunsell, but I grew up in Drumcondra—’

‘Where they speak the best English.’  That was a little unexpected, and he smiled.

'I think it is important to try to keep pace with modern literature. The first third is magnificent, not a representation of childhood, but the thing itself.’  As he thought; the vowels entirely English, but the r given a slightly fuller value, the terminal ts and ds soft.

‘But from then on a little self-regarding?’

‘Exactly.  Is that your wife, Mr Odell?  I think she wants you.’

Lucy was seeking his services as accompanist; he agreed gratefully.  It would keep him out of Ramsey’s ambit for a precious quarter-hour or so.  She sang ‘Orpheus with his lute’ and ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’; her voice was seasoned and rich, a mature mezzo soprano that came as a surprise to people acquainted with her bromidic good nature. 

> All lovers young, all lovers must  
>  Consign to thee, and come to dust.

She scurried back to a sofa to warm applause and a kiss from Louise.  Michael’s eye sought hers as she sat down, and she smiled at him without restraint for the first time since she had found out about Celia.  He glimpsed Mrs Maunsell in a corner: how eminently, Victorianly immobile she was.  He made to rise, but Louise, leaning over the soundboard of the baby grand, said, ‘Won’t you sing yourself, Michael?’

Michael’s voice was agreeable and little more; the bronchitic complaints which he suffered most winters had roughened and reduced the power of the clear, glacial tenor that had earned him a bronze medal in the Feis Ceoil of 1909. But this autumn he had so far escaped ill-health and, warmed by port, brandy and indignation, he felt rather robust. Ramsey leaned over the back of the sofa with a word of congratulation to Lucy; she blushed and put her hand to her mouth.  That settled it: even if no-one knew it but himself, he should have his little defiance.

> A-down the hill I went at morn,   
>  A lovely maid I spied,   
>  Her hair was bright as the dew that wets  
>  Sweet Anner's verdant side.   
> 

He relished the challenge of the phrasing, the variations in tempo, slowing as his voice rose on ‘raised her eyes of blue’, picking up merrily at ‘Go hide your blooms ye roses red, and droop ye lilies rare,’ to counter the line’s bland fustian, enjoying himself enough to forget why he had chosen the inane song in the first place.

> A-down the hill I went at morn,  
>  A-singing I did go,  
>  A-down the hill I went at morn,  
>  She answered soft and low,   
> 

He froze, suddenly, absolutely, unable to remember the innocuous words. Canon O’Neill’s sonorous, ingenious rhymes boomed and bounded through his brain as his right hand helplessly repeated the glissando: _did sound its loud tattoo better to die ‘neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sud el Bar_ _Britannia’s Huns with her long range guns perfidious Albion reel Wild Geese lonely graves are by Suvla’s waves oh had they died by Pearse’s side or fell with Cathal Brugha world did gaze with deep amaze parted then with those valiant men for Slavery fled you glorious dead_   

He daren’t look at the room, but he could feel it radiating sympathy, curiosity, complacency, and doubtless, from Ramsay’s direction, morose delectation.  Finally, it returned to him:

> Yes, I will be your own dear bride  
>  And I know that you'll be true,  
>  Then sighed in my arms, and all her charms,   
>  Were hid in the foggy dew.   
> 

He wanted to bolt from the room, preferably to somewhere where there was more drink, but forced himself up to a murmur of insincere congratulation.  Louise and her cousin could safely praise Lucy’s singing to him, so they did that, before drifting away to their other guests.  Ramsey was sitting beside Lucy now and Michael felt no inclination to exercise proprietorial arrogance. Perhaps now he might, he thought, respectably slip out for air.  

‘Mr Odell.’  The voice was crisp and compelling, but no louder than it needed to be to make itself heard.

He turned.  ‘Mrs Maunsell.’

‘That air you sang—’

‘It’s an old harp tune,’ he said quickly. ‘The words are somewhat foolish; sentimental—’

‘There are other words, new ones.  Better ones, though no less foolish.’

_She is amused_ , he thought with surprise, and then found himself without warning touched and sad.

‘I am a widow, Mr Odell.  I had four sons.  They served in the Royal Irish Regiment and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.’

 ‘Suvla—’ he breathed.

‘And indeed, Sedd el Bahr.  Terence, the youngest.  He was nineteen.’

 ‘I’m sorry to hear it.  My wife’s brother—’ 

‘It was a very bloody business. Giles and Rollo during the Gallipoli campaign also.  But Piers, the eldest, fell in Dublin, which was less bloody, until our government chose to collude with the Republicans to make it more so. The effort continues, I see. But I meant to say, Mr Odell, it makes no difference, the complexion of the sky.’

‘I—I’m sorry for your trouble, Mrs Maunsell.’ 

‘Thank you. Good night.’

She turned, leaving him to offer farewell to her long, straight, sea-green back.

Lucy was merry and giddy as they got into the cab; she put her hand on his.  He complimented her songs, and rather uncertainly, she replied in kind. 

‘No _plàmàs_ out of you.  I forgot my words.’  

‘Nobody noticed, I’m sure.’

Michael broke the short silence with, ‘I had a small bit of a row with Ramsey.’ 

‘I don’t think I like him awfully. He’s rather pushy.’

This was, from Lucy, high dispraise. He contented himself with it.  By the time they had reached the house, she was dozing on his shoulder.  For all her vulnerability in that posture, he felt a sense of ultimatum: he must, this time, school himself to live under her love’s sovereignty, or forever be an exile from it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Belvedere College is a Jesuit school in Dublin, alma mater of a number of famous Irishmen, including James Joyce. Kevin Barry (1902-1920), executed on 1 November 1920 for his part in an ambush that resulted in the deaths of three British soldiers, attended Belvedere between 1916 and 1919.
> 
> The speeches given here by Hamar Greenwood, Chief Secretary for Ireland, detailing the killings on the morning of Bloody Sunday, are taken verbatim from Hansard. Prime Minister's Questions on the day after Bloody Sunday were suspended when Joseph Devlin of the Irish Parliamentary Party insisted on asking a question about the Croke Park massacre; he was physically attacked by John Elsdale Molson, a Conservative MP.
> 
> Roger Casement became famous for his report uncovering horrific human rights abuses in the Belgian Congo. Casement was executed for treason following the Easter Rising. Support for clemency was undermined by the selective circulation by British authorities of his so-called Black Diaries, in which Casement recorded sexual liasions with men.
> 
> Feis Ceoil: an annual competitive music festival held in Dublin since 1897. Joyce won 3rd prize in the tenor solo category in 1903.
> 
> The novel alluded to by Michael and Mrs Maunsell is _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_. 
> 
> The Royal Irish Regiment and the Dublin Fusiliers formed part of the 10th (Irish) Division which participated in the bloody Gallipoli campaign, during which landings were made at Suvla and Sedd el Bahr. These actions are mentioned Canon O'Neill's 'The Foggy Dew': 'Twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky / Than at Sulva or Sud al Bar [sic]'.
> 
> Eight members of the Royal Irish Regiment were killed during the hostilities surrounding the Easter Rising.
> 
> My thanks to [AJHall](http://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/pseuds/AJHall) for the information that Antonia Forest imagined Mme Orly (here, Mrs Maunsell) to have been Anglo-Irish.
> 
>  _plàmàs_ (Irish): flattery


	3. Winter 1985/6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Laurie visits Dublin for the first time.

Laurie was used to clearances.  He and Ralph had made something of a virtue of impermanence until quite late in their lives, moving often, impoverishing themselves rather, but thereby able to sustain a sense of latitude necessary in different ways to both of them.  Making this final clearance was consequently difficult.  

Particular bequests to friends had, of course, been no trouble at all: the instructions left nothing to chance.  He had allowed the local teenagers whom he privately called the Thuggery to pick over the duplicate _Pilots_ , out-of-date electronics manuals, and LPs of Elgar and Finzi symphonies that he could very well live without, the latter proving unexpectedly popular.  Laurie maintained diplomatic relations with the Thuggery, as of two small countries forced into détente by a baleful neighbouring empire, but he was glad they no longer had reason to invade the kitchen with rolling tobacco, oily spare parts and aggressive lethargy. The clothes had been less of a wrench than he expected, despatched at the three-month mark that people sagely told him was quite usual: he kept one or two things as mementoes.   But the desk crouched and lurked.  In his blacker moments Laurie thought it might outlive him too.  And then the veil lifted—wryly, he noted that the old ballad's prescription of a year-and-a-day was not far off, in psychological terms—and he essayed it drawer by drawer. 

One was boringly sordid; he fed its contents to a small bonfire over the course of an afternoon, thinking of the Millais painting with the red-haired girl staring defiantly at the viewer over a pile of leaves.  He tore the intestines of four videotapes into a glossy black-brown hillock, and burned that too.  The plastic cartridges and plain cases he put into the ordinary rubbish.  The letters, the journals, the photographs; they could wait: he closed them back into their drawers.  Under a stack of old address books he found an envelope marked in Ralph’s hand: _Odell family_.  

Laurie tipped out the contents: two photographs, and a piece of curling, friable blue writing-paper. Olive had given him these after his mother’s death, he remembered, and he had been rather careless of them. Typical of Ralph, not to be.  A studio portrait of his mother and father; a wedding keepsake, by the looks of their costumes. The other photograph was a few years older, the surface scraped, buffeted about the edges. It showed a woman in black who must be his paternal grandmother, his father in a clerkly celluloid collar, wearing a sort of medal on his lapel, a girl in her teens looking too long and lanky for her loose hair and knee-length pinafore, and a small boy in a sailor suit. He turned it over. Olive’s writing: _Mrs Odell, Michael, Eileen & Francis, 1909_. The sheet of paper had two addresses on it: his father’s brother and sister.   He looked at the photograph again. If Eileen was alive in Kirkby, she would be at least ninety.  Francis must be eighty. It was possible. Francis and Maura Odell, 36 Eaton Square, Terenure, Dublin.  He wrote in no expectation of reply, but received one, extending expansive hospitality.  Laurie had never been to Dublin. It would be something to do in the louring void that came after Christmas and New Year.  He hoped his friends wouldn’t be _careful_ with him as they had been last Christmas, but it had never been a time of year he’d relished much anyway, and January was worse. Sitting at Ralph’s desk, he wrote back, then went into town, to the post office and the travel agent. 

Dublin Laurie found drab, pocked and cratered with poverty as English cities were once with bombsites.  Francis, a stooped, spry man in whose white hair and dry, taut-drawn skin Laurie was astonished to see an iteration of his own, could consume pints of black porter with terrific alacrity and continence, and this they proceeded to do in the Side Bar of the Shelbourne Hotel. He had been, until his retirement fifteen years before, a schoolmaster (chemistry, Christian Brothers). He still lived in the house that had been his mother’s until her death during what he called the _Emergency_ : a wide-open second syllable that sounded like _air_. Eileen had stayed single into her fifties and then become the second wife of a Liverpudlian captain in the merchant service; she had died six years ago. Francis had three children and seven grandchildren, the first great-grandchild on the way. They all lived in England. His wife Maura was dead just over a year. Laurie produced a phrase of consolation. His uncle's mode of conversation proved typical of his nation: to extract maximum confidence from one’s interlocutor, while giving nothing away of oneself but improbable anecdote.  Laurie could parry that pretty effectively, as it happened, but only by virtue of some specialist training.

'...and your man Ahern wakes up and roars, "More guns we want. Bags of guns!" and falls flat on his face snoring again.' Laurie laughed incredulously. Francis raised his glass. 'Good health.' 

'Likewise.'

'But you haven't come here to listen to me talk about the gobshites that for some reason we allow run this country. I don't know what I can tell you, really.' 

'It was a long time ago.' 

'He was more an uncle than a brother to me. We used get up to some mischief though.' He reminisced, preposterously, for a few moments.

'He was rather good at that. Some of my most vivid memories are of my mother casting us into the outer darkness, actually. Much more vivid than whatever we did to deserve it.'

'Our mammy had something of the same way about her. She could keep an atmosphere going for weeks. I thought Englishwomen would be kinder to their menfolk.'

'I'm afraid I'm not much of an authority on family relationships.' 

Laurie's tone was one to set a _ne plus ultra_ on the progress of the conversation; it amounted to an admission, but he saw no reason, these days, to let people off.  Francis's eye flickered over the walking-stick hanging on the back of his chair. Having not had that inference made for quite some years, Laurie suppressed the impulse to raise an eyebrow.

'Fair play. You're better off. Not that I had anything to complain of, God rest her soul.'  He took a draught of his pint and said without preamble, 'He worshipped her, you know.'

'I was given to understand he had a tendency to polytheism.'

'Wha'?  Oh, very good.'  He barked a harsh, foxy laugh. 'I wouldn't know much about that. I didn't see him after I was fourteen, fifteen. His letters were full of your mother.  And you—you were the only prodigy of the Western World, you were.  You'd have thought no child ever cut a tooth or got on its back legs before.  So it was a shock to Mammy when they—separated.'  He put an alien emphasis on the third syllable. 'She cut him off almost entirely. She was a hard woman, very hard, very hard.'

'You didn't try to see him, contact him—'

'I was just a lad, then.'

Laurie felt impatience rise.  'You must have been nineteen, twenty.'

'I was otherwise engaged, you might say,' Francis said calmly.  'With a number of other fellas. In the Curragh.'  


Laurie's first association was with a racecourse, then with a Mutiny, and he blinked incomprehension.  Then he remembered the date of his father's death.

'Those were bad times,' Francis went on. 'Brother against brother.  All over now, though.  Or so they'd have you believe.'  


'I'm sorry.  I had no idea.'

'How should you?  You were, what, six years of age?'

'Did he know?  That you'd been—interned?'

'Oh yes. Mammy broke her—embargo for that.'  He spoke so bitterly that Laurie frowned enquiringly.

'It wasn't till she was after dying I found out he had other troubles in his life at the time.  She let me think it was my fault.  Maybe it was.'

'And your sister? Didn't she say something?'

'Eileen was—very holy back in the day.  She was more of my opinion in political terms.  Not that she would let our mother know as much.  But she couldn't bring herself to talk about that other class of thing.  After Mammy died she loosened up a small bit.'

Laurie felt a fool, and looking away, made a helplessly compassionate gesture.

'Ah, sure. 'S all water under the bridge. We've a lot of bridges in this city. Pint?' 

When he returned with the drinks he said, 'Funny thing I always thought.  Michael—' it was the first time, Laurie noticed, that he had used his brother's given name—'was a lukewarm old Redmondite, but—'

Laurie had only the barest idea what this meant, and made a small interrogative noise.

'A Home Ruler, but imperialist.  I used write him about what was going on, and he'd—well, it was all information, no opinion.  Typical reporter.  But things sort of followed him around, towards the end of his life.  He married your mother a week after the Easter Rising.  And he died on the day of the Civil War ceasefire. You must think I'm very superstitious.'

Yes, Laurie thought, but he supposed this was the wrong answer, and Francis had spoken with the hard, bright callousness that closes a topic.  He fell into foggy, grey reverie, and by the time he emerged from it his uncle was speaking scornfully of some legend about the swans on the Liffey.

At last, Laurie tipped the old man into a taxi, ordered and ate a roast beef and tomato sandwich, crossed the Green to his guesthouse, and slept until half-nine that evening.

Glad he had thought of the sandwich, he made his way up to the north-eastern corner of the Green and turned down a street composed mostly, it seemed, of pubs.  There seemed nowhere, except a grimy chipshop that he recoiled from, to get anything to eat. Hearing music in one establishment, he entered. Dublin pubs still had the  dark, rackety, gaslit quality that he remembered most pubs having before, and for a while after, the war.  The back third of this one was a kind of shed, full of young people wearing bright knitwear and playing guitars and fiddles.  It was the sort of company he’d have paid to avoid when he was twenty-one.  He wedged himself against a barstool to listen.

After a few instrumental pieces, a man stood to sing: he was squarely-made, darkly handsome and bearded. A woman accompanied him on a mandolin, a silvery ripple running quick against the slow tempo of the melody.  A few phrases into the song, Laurie felt a quiver of recognition.

> And all I’ve done, for want of wit  
>  To memory now, I can’t recall—

There was a clangorous rumbling, like a Tube train passing, and he thought suddenly of a railway siding: the suburban line must run nearby.  The matter of the song was a wastrel’s sentimental self-exoneration, but the man’s voice was as impersonal as a bird’s, rising raggedly into the refrain. 

> Of all the comrades ere I had,  
>  They are sorry for my going away  
>  And all the sweethearts ere I had,  
>  They’d wish me one more day to stay.  
>  But since it falls unto my lot  
>  That I should rise, and you should not  
>  I gently rise, and softly call—  
> 

_That I should rise, and you should not._   Suddenly it meant not just standing up and turning away for the last time, but all the miserable collusions and petty humiliations of not automatically being considered _next of kin_ , the things he wasn’t told, the duties he could not perform, the documents he could not sign, the decisions he could not make, the places he could not be, and his face was unaccountably salty with it.  

He took off his spectacles as if to polish them and drew his other hand across his eyes. It was ludicrous—Ralph would have asked if he wanted a crape bonnet as well.  Actually, he wouldn’t: Ralph had been kind to the bereaved, especially the young ones, all his dyspeptic rhetoric simply, innocently suspended in the face of bare human misery.  All the same, it wasn’t seemly to weep. Laurie had lived to be old and widowed when young lovers were perishing in fear and horror and shame.  He thought of the trawler deck, puddled and slick with oil, blood, vomit, sea water— _all lovers young, all lovers must_.  But if he had bled to death there or succumbed later to sepsis there would have been no lies by omission about the cause of death: _cancer, pneumonia_ , _sudden heart failure_ —that was a very nice one, _sudden heart failure_.  He felt inchoately furious. He must be, he realised, still quite plastered; he hadn’t nearly slept off the afternoon’s drinking.   

He reached for his stick; it slid inevitably to the floor, slowly as things always seem to move when they are falling too fast to be caught.  

‘Here, let me.’  Laurie looked up to the singer’s smile: crooked but white in his dark beard. The man handed him the stick.

‘Thank you.  I am a very foolish fond old man.’

‘Not so old, surely,’ he replied, a hint of a tease in the voice.

‘Well, not quite four-score yet.’  Aware then they were at cross purposes, Laurie gave him a swift, narrow glance.  He was not as young as he had at first thought: the face was creased, and though few, there were grey strands in hair and beard.  He must be in his forties at least.  The man returned it steadily.  

‘You sang well.  What’s the name of that song?’

‘Thanks.  “The Parting Glass.”  Scottish, probably, not Irish, a bit older than you’d think.  Seventeen hundreds at the least.  Used to be a New Year’s song back in the day, before “Auld Lang Syne”  caught on.  Wakes, of course.  I like to end a session with it, send the punters home a little bit melancholy but a little bit uplifted too, you know the way.’

His dark brows drew together in a craftsmanlike frown and his blue eyes narrowed.  Actors grew solemn in a similar way as they talked about their work; Laurie was endeared by and admired, but could not respect it.  It occurred to him suddenly where he had heard the tune of the song before, long ago, distorted into something inhuman, belonging to those white uncharted spaces marked Here Be Dragons.  _A few odd corners left to do_ , he reflected, but now the thought did not oppress him.

‘I thought I’d heard it before.  I think my father used to sing it.  That sounds peculiar, excuse me.  I mean, he died when I was rather small and I don’t remember him well.  He was from Dublin.’

Laurie saw he had said the wrong thing—he had typed and classified himself: _enter somewhere else, English tripper, seeking his roots_.  ‘But that doesn’t matter,’  he added. ‘It’s not why I’m here.’  

‘OK, so.’ The singer shrugged a prelude to departure.

Laurie looked at his watch: not yet eleven.  ‘May I—stand you a drink, then?  It seems—apt.’

‘Ah, no thanks—’

Just in time, Laurie remembered the odd, pushy little ritual he had seen repeatedly enacted in the Side Bar that afternoon, and offered again.  This was a queer country: but by blood at least, it was half his own.  The man grinned guilelessly, and took him up on it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The painting Laurie thinks of over the bonfire is John Everett Millais' [Autumn Leaves](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Millais_leaves.jpg).
> 
> The Second World War was referred to in neutral Ireland as the Emergency.
> 
> Liam Ahern's 'Bags of Guns' speech, delivered in 1973 during a debate on a seizure of arms intended for the Provisional IRA, is one of the less edifying orations recorded in the proceedings of the Dàil.
> 
> 12,000 Anti-Treaty Republicans were interned during the Civil War, some of them in the Curragh Camp, a former British Army base in Co. Kildare. 
> 
> The Curragh Mutiny (or Curragh Incident, since it was not technically a mutiny) occurred when British Army officers stationed at the Curragh (and elsewhere) expressed their opposition to the Asquith government's plans forcibly to repress the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1914. Laurie's source of information on this point may be guessed at from the note to Chapter 1 of this story.
> 
> [The Parting Glass](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw024t1tDrA), sung by Ronnie Drew, with the Dubliners, and by [The Voice Squad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD2gZDcGa_I).


End file.
